Throughout the ongoing COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic, country music superstar Garth Brooks has admitted that his long-awaited new album, Fun, is all but finished. He just hasn't been sure how or when to roll out an album in a year when a stadium tour's out of the question and many fans face unexpected challenges.
"The album's ready to go," Brooks said during the May 11 episode of his weekly Inside Studio G livestream series. "It's just, how do you get out and promote and be happy and jolly while everybody's out there fighting for their lives not only physically, but fighting for their lives financially?"
?Brooks' team must've reached a conclusion that makes sense for the artist and his fans, because Fun will now hit shelves on Nov. 20.
"This should have been released last Christmas because we'd been working on it forever," Brooks told People. "So I think it's just time, you know?"
The album features two high-profile duets: the Blake Shelton team-up "Dive Bar" and Brooks and Trisha Yearwood's cover of "Shallow" from the Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga version of A Star is Born.
"When a song is 99 percent Trisha Yearwood or 99 percent Lady Gaga, there's going to be a strong performance happen, and the two guys — no offense to Bradley Cooper, no offense to Garth Brooks — just kind of hang on in the song," Brooks told People. "They can call it a duet all they want, but the truth is, I'm riding the coattails of one of the greatest singers in music history."
Other new songs we've already heard include "Stronger Than Me," which Brooks preformed at the 2018 CMA Awards in tribute to Yearwood, plus "All Day Long," "Courage of Love," "The Road I'm On," "Party Gras (The Mardi Gras Song)" and "That's What Cowboys Do."
So far, seven of the 14 album tracks can be found on Amazon Music.
Fun will be Brooks' first studio album since 2016's Gunslinger.
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The Oklahoma native turned Nashville icon will also re-release Triple Live, a compilation previously included in his The Legacy Collection vinyl box set, on Nov. 20. Triple Live Deluxe compiles songs from Brooks' 2014-2017 World Tour plus bonus tracks from his 2019 Stadium Tour. Think of it as a post-comeback answer to 1998's similarly packaged and promoted Double Live.
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